Monitoring tool

Hi,

I'm curious what monitoring tool are you using at your work for network/servers?

we are looking to change to something more "user friendly" and with autodiscover
Now we are using Nagios 3.0.

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networker050184

Check out Observium. Very user friendly and cheap.

Observium

alias454

We use PRTG not exactly cheap but works pretty decent. We used Nagios prior

paul78

I work at a company that cannot make up it's mind and our problem is that there isn't a monitoring tool we haven't tried. Personally, in my own lab, I use Shinken - similar to Nagios - I prefer toolsets that I can use as a monitoring aggregation framework.

Verities

HP Operations Manager

jerseyIT92

I like Opsview

DevilWAH

The best networking tool on the market

used it since the early days, its not as powerful as some of the rest but it does a lot for the money, and great for small teams where you don't have a dedicated team for monitoring and want a system that is easy to set up and usable by all member of the team.

WE have other more in-depth tools for specific tasks (cisco prime for example for network device life cycle), but mutiny is a great over view for device status and alerting of all IT systems that support SNMP.

Kai123

I work in an ISP and we use Nagios, and some in-house stuff for monitoring bandwidth and high packet traffic (DDOS monitoring).

gkca

We use Zabbix

jonny72

I've been looking in to monitoring tools recently as we need to get something in place.

So far I haven't found anything that really comes close to System Center. Pricing is reasonable for what it does (and cheap in the grand scheme of things), ticks a lot of boxes (monitoring, automation, incident/change management, backups), is fully integrated, Azure support built in and so on. Only issues are the complexity of installation and the resources needed to run it.

I've tried Nagios before and found it too complex to configure. Using products from multiple vendors seldom works out well, despite how well they tell you they integrate. Cheaper options are often a false economy, a missed issue or two leading to an outage can easily end up costing more than the more expensive/reliable option would have.

W Stewart

Really depends on your needs. Most places I've worked at used nagios but those jobs have all been linux heavy. The place I'm at now is trying to implement science logic but it's kind of buggy. Solar winds seems to have some pretty nice features but I don't think it's free. If you've only got a small number of servers, you can give monit a try as well. Nagios would be my recommendation for servers though since it's so widely used.

Hondabuff

SolarWinds Orion with Config Mgr.

ampdeck

you may want to check this Network & Server Monitoring Software | WhatsUp Gold

Mosaic3

We've had lots of success with CA Nimsoft.

devils_haircut

I use Nagios v4.1 + Observium for the school where I work. Setting up Nagios was tough at first, but I'm pretty comfortable with it now. Knowing a little bash scripting can make your life a lot easier, but it also helps to be organized about the way you setup your host groups and checks. I use a few plugins to see all our ESXi hosts and Windows servers (check_vmware_esx and check_wmi_plus).

I have Observium watching all the switches, our web filter, and our firewall. The LLDP mapping is great, and it doubles as a syslog server with a web feed that is nice to have. Between the two programs, I can basically monitor our entire infrastructure and be notified when something hits a threshold (or falls over).

Edificer

networker050184 wrote: »

Check out Observium. Very user friendly and cheap.

Observium

That looks actually really good. I plan on taking the initiative and buy the pro version and deploy it at my job next week. I'd like to have few monitors hanged up all of which run this software 24/7. In your expertise, what would be the best way to accomplish this?

devils_haircut

Observium is incredibly simple to setup on the server side. They have detailed instructions on their website. If you want to start customizing the front page, it can get a little tricky, but again...they have very good documentation on how to go about doing that.

Debian Ubuntu Installation - Observium <-- setup instructions
Configuration Options - Observium <-- very detailed configuration options

They recommend using Debian/Ubuntu, but I stuck with CentOS because it's what I know. If you already have SNMP enabled on your network devices, there isn't much more to it. Set up the server, run the included scripts to discover and poll your devices, and let it go. It's just an Apache web server, so as far as the multi-monitor setup goes, just open a new browser window on each screen.

networker050184

Edificer wrote: »

That looks actually really good. I plan on taking the initiative and buy the pro version and deploy it at my job next week. I'd like to have few monitors hanged up all of which run this software 24/7. In your expertise, what would be the best way to accomplish this?

We are in the process of doing the same thing with getting some monitors up in the NOC. It's very simple to install and use. The built in interface description parsing is very cool and simple to use as well. devils_haircut has great info on the rest. Good luck!

Edificer

Overload on great information! Thanks. I'm definitely sold. I will implement SNMPv3 and then go through with the purchase of Observium.

Edificer

networker050184 wrote: »

We are in the process of doing the same thing with getting some monitors up in the NOC. It's very simple to install and use. The built in interface description parsing is very cool and simple to use as well. devils_haircut has great info on the rest. Good luck!

devils_haircut wrote: »

Observium is incredibly simple to setup on the server side. They have detailed instructions on their website. If you want to start customizing the front page, it can get a little tricky, but again...they have very good documentation on how to go about doing that.

Debian Ubuntu Installation - Observium <-- setup instructions
Configuration Options - Observium <-- very detailed configuration options

They recommend using Debian/Ubuntu, but I stuck with CentOS because it's what I know. If you already have SNMP enabled on your network devices, there isn't much more to it. Set up the server, run the included scripts to discover and poll your devices, and let it go. It's just an Apache web server, so as far as the multi-monitor setup goes, just open a new browser window on each screen.

Bought Observium today, finally! Flew through the Debian/Ubuntu installation guide. Although, I seem to be having folders permission problems, during the configuration guide for Apache 2.4 I can't seem to write the alternative format over the existing .config file, should be able to find the problem tomorrow!

Thought I would let you know, thanks again networker050184 and devils_haircut for recommending Observium it's definitely user friendly, and a good network monitoring platform to get started with for noobs like me. lol

iBrokeIT

LibreNMS is an Obersvium fork and is worth checking out. It has a much better community and support than Observium.

Relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/38dvh9/my_experience_with_observium_management/

Edificer

iBrokeIT wrote: »

LibreNMS is an Obersvium fork and is worth checking out. It has a much better community and support than Observium.

Relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/38dvh9/my_experience_with_observium_management/

Interesting. I tried joining Web IRC but keep getting auto-killed(banned).

beads

SolarWinds and ExtraHop - outstanding if not pricey!

- b/eads

systemstech

Opsview is awesome and free.